


so it is

by brella



Category: Morning Glories
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-04-27
Updated: 2014-04-27
Packaged: 2018-01-21 01:47:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,449
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1533182
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/brella/pseuds/brella
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Hunter is an endless loop of the same fuck-ups. (Casey doesn't mind.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	so it is

**Author's Note:**

  * For [sarcat](https://archiveofourown.org/users/sarcat/gifts).



> Catherine darling, you prompted this like... a billion years ago, and I was stuck on it for a while, but you were having a bad week and I wanted to finish it up for you to hopefully give you something to lift your spirits. HAHA WHO AM I KIDDING, CASEY/HUNTER, LIFTING PEOPLE'S SPIRITS? HILARIOUS.  
> Anyway, Cat, you are amazing and I'm so proud of you, and I hope you enjoy!

**one.**

“He is my brother,” Jun says, steely eyes focused dully on the eviscerated bodies hanging from the wall.

Hunter’s panting, even though he hasn’t done much moving in the past several… hours, probably? Other than scooting around pathetically like a time-disoriented fish. The ropes around his wrists have cut into the skin from how much he’s strained against them, and his feet crawl with fizzling white noise from lack of circulation.

“Brother,” he echoes under his breath, feeling suddenly dizzy, so maybe it’s a good thing he’s sitting down. “Brother, yeah, okay – Jun – you gotta get me out of this; Casey’s waiting for me—”

Jun raises his eyebrows and blinks, as if he’d forgotten Hunter was there, before distantly muttering an “Ah, of course,” and reaching swiftly for the thick knot pressing into the base of Hunter’s spine.

“Hunter,” Jun exclaims after a moment, sounding concerned. “Your wrists—”

“Yeah, yeah, I know,” Hunter cuts him off, bouncing slightly with impatience. “I’m good; I’ll be okay. Just untie me.”

“Where were you supposed to meet Casey?” Jun asks.

Hunter’s eyes can’t leave the black, dirt-written words on the floor. The bristled edges of each stroke prod at something inside of him like animal claws, and his mind leaps back to the wet and dying noises each of the other boys had made, to how the pitches of their voices had risen with their terrified tears. He gulps.  

“The apple tree,” he mumbles, feeling something hard and unpleasant start to take form in the middle of his throat. “At five—”

“I passed it on my way here,” Jun says with clear hesitation. “There was no one there. It is dark now.”

Hunter's stomach twinges unpleasantly and his shoulders start to slacken in surrender, but there's something to be admired, he guesses, in how he still doesn't quite let it go. Or something really, really pathetic.

“What time is it now? Maybe I can still—”

“It is eight o'clock,” Jun murmurs without pause, though his tone betrays his regret. “Hunter, do not worry. I am sure if you apologize, she…”

“Fuck,” Hunter whispers under his breath, a knee-jerk exclamation. The ropes come undone and he tangles his fingers into his hair, slumping forward with his eyes wrenched shut. “ _Fuck_!”

A commiserating hand, broad and heavy, falls to his shoulder. Ignoring it, he moves in a single swerve of his body to stand, forgetting that his feet are still bound together.

The loss of balance feels a lot less physical than emotional, is all he’s saying. Although, the bleeding scrape he gets on his elbow, since Jun was too busy thinking about his _twin brother_ (???) to catch him – he definitely feels _that_ the way he’s supposed to.

He and Jun walk back to the school in silence. Hunter hadn’t even noticed how far the greenhouse was from the actual campus; he’d been too busy fearing for his life and the intactness of his face to give much attention to travel time. And, also, he’d been unconscious for some portion of it, so.

The point is, he has plenty of time to dwell on the feeling of profound and happiness-swallowing misery gnawing at him from the chest out. His left cheek is swollen and the inside of it is tender from where he’d bitten it, and his lower lip definitely has a cut on it. He runs his tongue experimentally over it and grimaces at the sting.

“Do I have blood on my face?” he asks.

Jun nods with a grunt of affirmation, but provides nothing further, so Hunter just leaves it. Who’s he got to impress now, anyway?

“This date,” Jun says, at last, giving Hunter a bit of a start as they both clamber over a fallen branch. The lights of the school are visible between the blotted leaves of the trees. “What were you planning for it?”

Hunter’s cheeks feel like they catch fire the second he replays that conversation in the sunny library, the second he recalls Casey’s warm and simple smile and the way “Okay” had sounded like a wind chime when she’d said it.

“I, uh…” His hand finds the back of his neck and scratches at the hairs there. “I had a picnic planned, y’know? I was gonna go to the dining hall and get some food and we were just…” His mouth thins ruefully. “We were gonna talk, and I dunno, maybe I could’ve said something funny that’d make her laugh, and I’d drop some smooth line about how nice it sounded and then – I’d probably _want_ to, y’know, do the kissing thing, but I wouldn’t, because…”

“Because?” Jun prods him when he winds off, and Hunter shakes his head, cramming his hands into his pockets and slouching.

“I’unno,” he mumbles back. “Didn’t really think it was that important.”

“You are content just to spend time with her,” Jun provides for him. Hunter lets out a weak attempt at a noncommittal noise and Jun sighs, long and thoughtful, letting the statement settle. “Do not worry, Hunter. I’m sure she will understand.”

“I hope so,” Hunter whispers, even though he has a feeling that she never really will.

  
  
  
  
  


**two.**

“Sorry,” is the first word that races hastily out from between his teeth when he stumbles to a harum-scarum halt in the library with sweat on his forehead and a thick, dusty tome in his hand.  

She stares down at his doubled-over form with her eyebrows arched. He braces his hands on his knees and blows heavy exhales out, steadily catching his breath.

“You know, you should really watch it with the running thing,” Casey tells him in lieu of verbal pardon, because she has heard so many of his apologies that she no longer knows how to respond to them.

“Man.” He straightens, grinning, cheeks flushed. “Can’t say I haven’t heard that one before.”  

“One of these days you’re going to overdo it, is all I’m saying.” She sighs, but abandons the conversational thread, pointing instead to the book he’s clutching. “What’s that?”

He blinks, his mind catching up to the question with skittering feet, before glancing at the cover and giving a small start as though he’s been prodded into action.

“Oh, this?” he replies, and Casey can already tell from two syllables alone that he’s about to start babbling. “Well, see, you remember that thing I told you about how I might have time-traveled to Ancient Sumer and stopped off in the Tower of Babel for some stuff that I still do not remember or understand, and then I got shot, and stuff? Well, this is the school’s only book on Sumerian history and culture, see, and it’s even got some language stuff in the back, so maybe if I can remember what the guys in the tower were saying, I can—”

“What do you mean, remember what they were saying?” Casey frowns. “Nobody knows exactly what Sumerian is supposed to sound like; it’s an extinct language.”

Hunter scratches his head. “You mean dead language, right?”

Casey blows her hair out of her face, trying to act like she isn’t as pleased as she always is to be explaining something, to be spouting off knowledge. “No, I mean extinct. Dead implies that it’s just not used in everyday modern conversation. Like Latin.”

Hunter looks fascinated, if his protuberant eyes are anything to go by.

“Whoa,” he breathes. “So you’re saying I heard a language that nobody on the planet knows or remembers anymore?”

Casey considers nitpicking the technicality – that there are plenty of people who can read it, but not any who can authentically speak it – but lets it go. “Something like that. The point is, I don’t think your basic Cuneiform 101 is going to be much help. And it’s a language isolate, so you wouldn’t be able to make informed guesses based on other languages either.”

“How is it you know literally everything about everything?” Hunter asks, but he’s grinning at her, perpetually amazed.

“I, um…” Casey shrugs. “I dunno, I read a lot.”

Hunter slams the textbook down on the table surface and earns several over-the-shoulder stares from various studying library patrons, the combined power of which makes his ears go red. Casey reels in a snort, but she must make an amused noise regardless of her efforts, because Hunter looks even more self-conscious.

“Anyway,” he whispers, making a blatant effort at keeping his voice low, “I thought that if I could remember anything useful, it might… help.”

He presses a hand to the back of his neck, his eyes downcast.

“I figure,” he continues, the softness now perhaps more dejected than polite, “I mean, I figure I might as well try to do _something_ to help. I know I’m not good for much, but…”

“Hunter, stop it,” Casey orders immediately, and he clamps his mouth shut. _You’re great_ , she thinks. “You’re fine.”

She steps closer until they’re nearly shoulder-to-shoulder, standing beside each other with their hands braced on the edge of the table in matching positions, the both of them focused on the dusty cover. She sucks in a breath for resolve and reaches for it, but he does the same thing at the same time, and the knuckles of their ring fingers bump against each other’s.

She’s the first to dart her hand away, just on instinct, as though she’d just touched something that had made a particularly loud and unwelcome noise. Static fizzles in her wrist bone and Hunter swallows audibly next to her.

“Sorry, sorry, my fault,” he blurts out. “I’ll, uh… let’s see here…”

He flicks the book open a bit too quickly, rifling through the pages with abandon that Casey knows is the opposite of logical for absorbing any information within them. His shoulders are rigid and his face is still flushed and, just looking at him, she can sense all of the internal berating that’s going on behind those green eyes, beneath that untidy shock of orange.

She steels herself and strays her fingers to his forearm, halting them there. He stills instantly, one hand still poised with a page half-turned.

“Slow down,” she tells him quietly. And, for the first time since she’s met him, he does.

(She doesn’t even notice until he’s started to lean into the touch that she’s still holding his arm, and she draws away immediately like she’d never even been there at all, and if the absence of her palm leaves his whole body cold, if the leftover vestiges of her pulse where it had touched his skin leave his heart in thunderous motion, he doesn’t do anything to show it. He never does, so she never knows, and her dad had taught her about what happens when you assume.)  

  
  
  


 

 

 

**three.**

“He’s late,” Jade murmurs.

Casey doesn’t know how she can tell; Hunter had always been the only one out of all of them to actually wear a watch. Her eyes rove in assessment over the other occupants of the basement room – Ike, leaning against the door frame; Guillaume, arms crossed, glowering at him, no doubt for some provocatory comment that Casey had not heard; Jun, in virtually the same pose and attitude; and Vanessa, in the middle of tying her hair into a ponytail, hovering unsurely at Casey’s left side while Jade stands firmly at her right.

“This is news?” Ike chimes in, examining his fingernails. “He’s _always_ bumbling in here twenty minutes past the rendezvous point; I don’t know if it’s even worth your energy anymore to be offended.”

“Stop saying stuff like ‘rendezvous point,’” Jade commands, brandishing halting hands at him. “We’re not _spies_.”

“Listen, Ellsworth, we have a dingy room in a basement for a clubhouse, so I say we need all the tinctures of espionage and excitement we can muster,” Ike retorts. He stretches both arms above his head, reminding Casey of an especially apathetic cat. “Although if you really want to go all out here, I see no reason why we can’t assign code names.” He points to Jade and then Casey in sequence. “You can be Boobs, and you can be Alpha Boobs.”

Jade physically goes to the trouble of rolling up her sleeve and crossing the room to punch him hard in the shoulder. He yelps. Ordinarily, the sight would bring Casey nothing but satisfaction, but there’s a gnarled spot in her stomach that refuses to lessen.

“Still, this isn’t like him,” she says, her voice quiet. Jade stalks back to stand next to her again, her glower at Ike quickly morphing into a concerned frown.

Ike pulls a face. “Didn’t I just say—”

“I know what you said, but it’s been way more than ten minutes,” Casey cuts him off, unable to keep the edge out of her voice. Ike puts his hands up in surrender. “You’re his roommate, aren’t you? Where the hell is he?”

“Sadly, the tracker that I normally keep attached to him at all times is malfunctioning,” Ike deadpans. Casey sets her jaw threateningly, but before Ike can speak again, Guillaume takes over.

“He wasn’t in his bed when we left,” he says, sounding begrudging to be sharing this information, the way he usually is. “We assumed he’d gone ahead.”

“Like hell we did,” Jun barks. He jerks his head in Ike’s direction. “I _told_ you idiots that he would not have left without us.”

“You would be surprised at the lengths to which he will go for quality time with our fearless leader,” Ike quips.

“How long had he been gone?” Casey demands. There’s a tightness in her throat now that she knows all too well – the same tightness that would clench her whenever her parents weren’t home when they’d said they would be, whenever they weren’t answering their cell phones. “Did any of you hear him leave?”

“Why, Casey, I’m astonished that you’re capable of caring this much,” Ike leers.

“Ike, seriously, knock it off,” Jade whispers harshly, and all of the previous spite is gone from her voice; it's more imploring now, more familiar than Casey wants to inquire about.

Ike heeds her, rolling his eyes but falling silent.

“Is there anywhere he would have gone – anything he would have done on his way here?” Vanessa asks Casey in a calm voice. “Does he know how to get here on his own?”

“He's... never been very good with directions,” Casey replies, only half-paying attention. Her eyes are focused with intensity on the empty doorway, like she can summon Hunter to the room if she wills it hard enough.

“He could’ve just gotten lost,” Jade suggests, sounding just a tincture too hopeful. Casey can tell that she’s reaching. Her voice always hits bumps when she’s reaching.

“Then that’s his problem,” Ike interjects, unable to surrender his domineering role in the conversation. “We have a dozen other things on the agenda that require deliberation, and Hunter’s laundry list of shortcomings is a discussion for another time. I say that with _great_ dismay, as there’s nothing I’d enjoy more than riffing on them for the next several days at the least.” He sends a pointed, focused smirk Casey’s way. “Although, I have to admit, your theatrical reaction to his absence is a sight to behold.”

“Shut up,” Jun snaps before Casey can beat him to it.

“I agree,” she says coldly. “I know how hard this might be for the assholes in the room to grasp, but it’s generally a good idea to be concerned when somebody in a group doesn’t show up to something important.”

“Thank God; for a second I thought you were going to call us a team and we’d have to wear jerseys,” Ike deadpans with a histrionic roll of his eyes.

Casey bristles, but thinks the better of retorting again. She inhales, slowly, closing her eyes under her pinched eyebrows, trying to rattle off the persistent unsettled feeling in the pit of her stomach.  

“Casey,” Jade murmurs aside, and Casey feels a hand on her shoulder. She loosens. “I’m sure he’s fine. And if he’s not… we’re us. We’ll do something. But for now…”

She trails off, gripping Casey’s shoulder in lieu of finishing. Casey nods a few times, rapidly, blowing out the breath she’d been holding and putting her hands on her hips, straightening with resolve.  

“We can figure it out later,” she announces. “First order of business…”

It’s three days before any of them see Hunter again, and Casey cannot recall a time in her immediate life during which she felt more paralyzed with guilt than she does over the course of those hours. The worst part, she thinks, is that she shouldn’t be susceptible to paralysis, no matter what’s taken away from her; she should always be able to surge into motion, but all she does for those three days is sit and stare out windows and bite her painted nails down to the quick and not sleep.

She barely has the time to start to think _how dare he_ before Jun shows up at the door of hers and Jade’s room with a grim look on his face. She doesn’t wait for any explanations; she’s never liked those; instead, she shoulders past him and half-runs to the boys’ room next door, making it there in only a couple of strides. She halts in the doorway, swallowing back the impulse to sprint at him and grip his face at either side and tell him _never to do this again_ , but all of that fades when she glimpses the state of his face.

He's all right, after a few days – after the bruises and scabs have faded. Casey goes with Jun to the gym for six mornings in a row and hits the punching bag as violently hard as she can, snarling at nothing, until her knuckles are numb, but when Hunter finally comes back to class on Monday and sits behind her, she just smiles congenially and tells him that she's happy he looks so much better.

She leaves it at that.

  
  
  


 

 **f** **our**.

He’s known for a long time that he can’t trust his watch (or clocks, or alarms, or anything that measures time except maybe a sundial; he’s never tried so he honestly cannot say), but this takes the cake on watch-betrayals. He’s sprinting down the hallway, yelling out apologies at everyone he narrowly avoids knocking to the floor, and he’s pretty sure he’s sent at least a dozen sheets of paper flying in his wake, but he’s not about to slow down. Not when he’s an hour and a half late for the study… not date, the date of studying and not dating, not being a date, the study _friendly get-together_ he’d planned with Casey a _week in advance_ , just to try to lower the chances of his being late.

That turned out great, Hunter. Smart.

He rounds the corner to the dorm rooms in a scramble, dashing past his own, where he’s pretty sure he glimpses Ike reading (big surprise there), and carries on undaunted another several feet before leaping into an open doorway (the one he’d be able to find blindfolded, probably).

(But let’s not test that; he’s had enough of blindfolds and hands being tied and—)

He doubles over with his hands on his knees, gearing up to wheeze out an apology. It’s quiet in Casey’s room; he assumes that Jade and the Crazy Roommate (it helps not to call her by name) are out, since no teasing and/or demented remarks are made in his direction. After a few seconds of recovery, he lurches back up again, exhaling heavily and pushing his hair out of his face, starting on a frenzied statement of regret.

He blinks and claps his mouth shut, the words dissolving. Casey is slumped over at her desk with her cheek resting on her folded arms, asleep. Blonde curls splay out in all directions, a few of them across her sleep-softened face, shifting on the plane of her back as she breathes.

He freezes immediately, convinced that even the most microscopic movement will snap her awake and ruin everything. He knows that she hasn’t been sleeping much – Jade told him so – mostly because when she does, she has nightmares, or at least because she’s got better things to do, like drawing up plans for their survival and liberation, and stuff. Lately, not even the concealer she tactfully puts on every morning has been able to obfuscate the dark rings under her eyes, and not even the deepest of breaths she takes has been able to unravel the harsh tension in her shoulders. And, like, he barely knows Casey; he’ll readily admit it; but he _does_ know that he hates seeing her like that – thinking she’s the only one tough enough to both carry the world and protect it from harm, foregoing her own sanity for the sake of everyone else’s. He might have thought it was admirable, once, back when the most logical thing to look for in a place like this had been a superhero, but it had very quickly occurred to him that Casey is a person and Casey has dreams and Casey gets scared and Casey _cries_ (in front of _him_ , and she does it for a long time), so now all he thinks of it is that it isn’t fair.

Now, though, she’s loose and still and none of the features on her face are drawn taut the way they usually are; every now and then, she lets out a noise somewhere between a hum and a sigh before her steady breathing flows back again.

Her mouth is slightly open. She’s drooling.

He doesn’t feel the sentimental smile tug its way onto his face at first. She looks nice when she’s asleep, or maybe she just looks nice when she’s not concentrating on being savior of all mankind, or whatever it is she’ll grow up to be. Her fingers twitch periodically, and the ceaseless sound of her respirations fills the room, a quiet reminder of life, much lighter than the tenacity of her hammering heart.

He only stands there for a few seconds, because watching people sleep is creepy, but before he leaves, he holds his breath, gripping the strap of his bag in two hands, inexplicably mesmerized. It’s not that he hasn’t seen Casey unguarded before—he has (for reasons he’ll never be able to figure out, but it probably has to do with the fact that she thinks he’s the least worth her time and therefore won’t cause any ramifications for emotional openness)—but it’s different this time.

It’s the first time in his life he’s ever been glad he’s late.

He debates writing her a note saying he came by, he’s sorry, maybe some other time—he has his notebook open and everything, but he can’t find a pen for the life of him. After a few seconds, he gives up, slipping the notebook back into his bag as quietly as he can and turning back to her.

Saying “sweet dreams” would be really dumb, and maybe a little creepy, but he does it anyway. He does nothing to conceal the affectionate tilt to the smile on his face, and he makes sure to turn the light off when he leaves.

No big deal.

  
  
  


 

 

 

 **five**.

“I’m so sorry,” Hodge says quietly. Her arms are holding him back. “You’re too late.”

And fuck that, _fuck that_ ; he writhes harder and scrambles as much as he can, kicking and thrashing, ignoring the fact that his body isn’t built for this. The rain is coming down hard; he can barely see what he’s trying to get to anyway, and his hair is matted, sodden, to his clammy forehead. He’s yelling and cursing and he doesn’t let up, shouting a name that sounds worse and worse the more his ragged voice builds, and he blacks out still thrashing to the harsh sound of, “ _Go to sleep_.”

“Where is she?” Jade’s voice wobbles plaintively and her thick mascara is running in grim rivulets down her anger-contorted cheeks. Her fists are clenched at her sides and her arms are shaking. She doesn’t take her red-edged, glimmering eyes off of him, but he keeps his gaze on the floor, jaw set rigidly, stomach twinging painfully.

“ _Answer me_!” Jade screams. Everyone milling through the hallway stops and starts to stare. Hunter doesn’t move.

Jade’s hand strikes him, swift and unforgiving, across the cheek, with force so strong that it throws his head to the side and sends him stumbling a couple of steps back. His teeth drive down into his tongue from the force, and he feels blood bubble in his mouth. He doesn’t know where the ground goes; the spot where she had slapped him burns, sending fizzling white pain across his whole face, but he makes no moves to cover it. A trickle of blood seeps out of the corner of his mouth. He wipes at it, and it smears over the side of his hand.

“You _fuck_!” Jade spits, grabbing the collar of his shirt and shaking him. Her teeth are gritted, and her cheeks are glistening with multiple tear trails now. Her spiteful glare crumbles into something more sorrowful, and she shakes him again, more weakly this time. “Where’s _Casey_?”

He shakes his head wordlessly. Jade’s face contorts and she shoves him, roughly, with brutish strength, to the ground, where he lands sprawling on his back. The impact sends supplies and notebooks spilling from his open bag. People step around him, whispering amongst themselves, and Jade stands over him, wrathful, grief-stricken, crying openly now.

“Where’s Casey?” she chokes out, all previous silence-gripping ire gone with only a cracking little girl’s whisper left.

He’s a fucking piece of shit.

He starts crying, then, too. It’s silent, all through his nose, his eyes wrenched closed and his mouth wrenched downwards, but it’s messy and ugly and the choked exhales are like blows dealt to his aching stomach, and he just _lies there_ , remembering how his usual dreamscape of the AV clubroom had suddenly morphed into the hazy sight of Casey, pushing aside the stone to the cave for the last time, and he had _known_ , right then, what she planned to do, what the final sacrifice would be (or what Hodge had tricked her into thinking it would be); he had torn out of bed and sprinted into the woods barefoot in his pajamas, sweating and out of breath, his heart growing smaller and more constricted by the second, a thousand stupid things milling around in his head – _You’ll probably win a Nobel Prize one of these days, what was your favorite scene in_ Blade Runner _, you really should give yourself a break every once in a while, I’ve thought about kissing you almost twenty-three times, live, come on, for me_ – and he’d gotten there in time for the bright blue light to wash out every tree for an instant, and then it had dimmed, and only Hodge had been standing outside the entrance, looking both annoyed and surprised to see him.

It’s different in the movies. In the movies, there’s always one last scene before Something Happens; you get to say everything you need to, you get to do all the things you wish you had sooner, you get to do something _meaningful_ , just once, before you have to walk around for the rest of your life feeling like you’re missing a rib.

His life has never been one of the movies, though. In movies, the good guys win and time is relative and life has narrative organization and death is painless (like falling asleep) and everyone is always punctual.

For a while, he can’t even remember the last thing she said to him. It comes to him eventually, when he’s on a plane back to Toronto. He’d apologized for being late, and she’d smiled that indulgent smile and replied—

_“I don’t really mind anymore. It’s part of your charm. I’ll see you around, Hunter.”_

Her voice had hitched on the last part. Maybe she’d known all along that that was good-bye.

  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  


 

 

**+.**

It’s his twenty-first birthday, which means it’s hers, too, and Ike’s, and Jade’s, and Zoe’s, and Jun’s, and everyone else’s. It’s his twenty-first birthday and he’s writing his undergraduate thesis on the use of oblique angles as a trend in science fiction cinema instead of going to the Bloor by himself. Figures.

Jade’s probably going to be pinging up on Skype soon, the way she does every year, for what she refers to as the Birthday Conference Calls; he’s not going to ask this year why Ike is just conveniently _there_ with her even though they’re supposed to live half a country apart. Exchanging rolls of the eyes over webcam with Zoe usually suffices.

They never talk about Casey. It’s kind of an unspoken agreement, mostly because Zoe acts like she doesn’t want to and Ike can never resist shoehorning in some insensitive comment for the hell of it, and Jade still carries a black bitter spot on her heart from the fact that Hunter still hasn’t told her what happened or where Casey went, but she’s moved past blaming him for it, because how could he know for sure, really? How could any of them know for sure?

He’s graduating in a month, same as Jade. Zoe had graduated a year early, but Hunter and Jade secretly believe that this was just because UC San Diego’s Biochemistry department was so frightened of her that it wanted her out of there as soon as possible. He doesn’t really know what he wants to do with a degree in film. Make movies, probably. That seems logical.

He hears a knock at the door and twists around in his swivel chair, one stick of Pocky still clenched between his teeth. He cannot fathom a single reason why any of his friends would voluntarily be at his place on a sunny weekend afternoon, even if it _is_ his birthday, and his roommate’s been gone all week on some travel course to the Galapagos.

He glances at the clock on his wall.

2:47, it says.

The knock sounds again, more tentative and slow this time. He sighs, disentangling his crossed legs from each other and half-stumbling out of the chair he’s practically been glued to all day, rubbing at his eyes under his reading glasses (which he really needs to clean, like, really). He reaches the door with a yawn, scratching the back of his neck and gripping the knob half-limply, using the minimum amount of effort required to turn it and pull the door open.

His heart chokes on itself and stutters to a stop. His hand slips dumbfoundedly off of the knob, hitting the side of his leg.

“Happy birthday,” Casey Blevins says.

His first instinct is to close the door, to slap himself in the bathroom and splash cold water on his face until he stops doing this to himself, because it’s happened too many times over the years, but instead, he stands absolutely still, wide-eyed, bare feet chilled. She’s still taller than he is, even after his growth spurt, but her hair is shorter (much shorter, barely tickling the bottoms of her ears) and dyed black (though blonde roots are showing) and she’s wearing a dress with floral print that doesn’t seem to conform to what he remembers of her tastes at all. Her legs look longer and her arms have new, dark freckles on them. She’s holding onto the strap of a messenger bag.

“Say something,” she mutters.

“You’re alive?” he rasps, even though he’d had no plans to say anything at all, and he knows it isn’t her powers that do it to him, because none of them have those anymore.

Casey nods, eyes straying down with something like guilt. He wonders if he looks older in the same way that she does. He feels the same, although the protrusion of a stomach that he’d had as a teenager is gone now.

“No,” Hunter hears himself blurt out, and when Casey’s searing blue eyes dart back up to his, he shakes his head, stepping backwards. “No. No way. You can’t do this; you can’t just _do_ this. You can’t just come _back_. Where were you?” His voice has heat in it now, and he feels an involuntary glower tightening on his face. “Where the hell were _you_?! Do you have any idea—”

“Some,” she cuts in, at a normal volume, silencing him immediately. She locks eyes with him and his throat hitches. “I have some idea.”

“No,” Hunter repeats, unable to keep the bitterness out of his voice. “You’re gone. That’s what happened. I _saw_ it.”

Casey looks surprised at that, brow furrowing, but she shudders off the impending question and closes her eyes, taking in a shaky breath.

“I’ve been waiting,” she explains tightly. “I’ve been waiting for five years to be able to do this. To come see you. Every day—”

“Does that make it better?” Hunter demands. “You couldn’t give us a call, or something? Just a quick, ‘Oh, hey, I’m still alive; don’t freak out?’ Do you have any idea how much it fucked Jade up, losing you?”

Casey winces at that as though he’s just punched her in the stomach, but she presses on.

“Five years,” she says, her voice even, a stark contrast to the moisture starting to gather at the edges of her eyes. “All of it was planned out. Hodge thought she’d gotten rid of me, but she didn’t know that Abraham had told me to—”

“I don’t care!” Hunter shouts, which is a lie. Her dress has no straps. Her shoulders, lightly dotted, keep catching his eye; her whole throat bobs whenever she swallows. “You can’t just show up again after five years, all right? That’s not how it works.”

“Then how does it work?!” Casey demands, torso jerking forward with emphasis, and her face is suddenly a couple of inches from his, her glare riveted fiercely onto him. “What do you want me to _do_ , Hunter? I came to you first; doesn’t that _say_ something?!”

“I—”

Hunter’s voice fails him. He doesn’t blink, gazing slightly up at her, fists clenched into numbness. The heat seeping out of her wakes him up to it, suddenly: Casey is here, Casey is alive, Casey is five years older just like he is and there’s a new scar on the side of her neck that had never been there when he’d known her, when she’d done her homework with him and forgiven him for missing a picnic and soaked his shirt with her hot and unrelenting tears, when she’d gripped his hand so tightly it had hurt, one time, when they’d been sneaking around after curfew and a couple of guards had almost rounded the corner and caught them.

“I missed you,” he says loudly – spits it out at her, really, like it’s some rancorous grievance. “You were so fucking stupid. Getting out of there wasn’t worth _anything_ if we had to trade _you_ for it. You really think we cared about it if you weren’t right there with us?”

She looks surprised at that, too, blinking rapidly, her frown ebbing away into blankness.

“You really think _I_ cared?” he finishes, the words hushed under the weight of their honesty. He’s never been good at articulating this kind of stuff. He just hopes that she _gets it_.

Casey wets and then bites her lower lip, her two front teeth clamping down on it until the color washes out of it. His stomach tugs with want that he can’t explain, and his palms start to tingle like they need to grip something, but he doesn’t know what.

“I guess—” She shakes her head, bringing her fingers to her hair and combing it back. “I guess I figured you’d get over it.”

Never. Never, never, _never_ , and it’s fucking _pathetic_.

They’d talked about the samsara back at the Academy – an endless cycle, lives circling each other without finish, chasing one another’s heels over and over again a thousand different ways. Future Jade had come back to him once, months after the Woodrun thing, and he thinks it had been a dream, because she’d flickered back and forth between the Jade he knew and the Jade he never would. “It’s always the same,” she’d said, “With you and Casey. You two can never quite get it right. You’re always missing each other, always losing each other before you can try anything. Sometimes you die for her; sometimes it’s the other way around, but one of you always goes before the other. No one can ever stop you.” She’d looked over at him with weariness in her eyes. “I wish somebody could stop you.”

The samsara is broken now, though – it’s kind of terrifying, knowing that they’ll never get a second chance, knowing that this is it and always will be and nobody else in the world will ever know the difference. Maybe that’s why he takes Casey’s face in his hands and stands on his toes and kisses her, softly at first but eventually with pent-up fervency when she yanks him closer, hoping that it will do a better job of speaking than he ever could. He fists his fingers into her short hair and tilts his head to taste her better and tries not to let his nose get in the way and remembers how much he’d wanted to do this, in the library, in the woods, somewhere dark and quiet where it would be easier to pretend that they were just a couple of regular people.

Skype starts ringing its melodic ring, startling them both into breaking apart with a gasp. Casey’s hands are on his waist and one of his is on her shoulder, and her hair is mussed, and his lower lip feels a little swollen.

“That’s Jade,” he manages to get out in a hoarse voice, his heart jackhammering in his chest, his stomach knotting itself relentlessly. “Should I—”

Casey surprises him by tugging him into a hug, her chin dropping onto his shoulder, her body starting to palpitate with what he thinks are quiet sobs. He can feel her smile pressing into the side of his neck.

“Answer it,” she whispers, seeming more human and terrified than she ever has, seeming indescribably far from a warrior, from a god (and, with that distance, becoming divine). “Birthday surprise, I guess.”

“In a second,” Hunter murmurs, closing his eyes, the ticks of the clock over the computer in perfect time with the rhythmic beating of Casey’s heart against his chest. “In a second.”

**Author's Note:**

> I listened to "The Blower's Daughter" by Damien Rice a lot while writing this, just so you know. In case you want double the sads.


End file.
